COP27: The forgotten sustainable development goals

COP27: The forgotten sustainable development goals

Subject: Environment

Context-

At Sharm El-Sheikh, while the spotlight is firmly on the 27th Conference of Parties (COP27) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, a pavilion hosted by the United Nations is getting considerable attention for spotlighting the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

About the SDGs-

• Sustainable development is defined as the development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
  • This most widely accepted definition of Sustainable Development was given by the Brundtland Commission in its report Our Common Future (1987).
• The 17 SDGs (169 targets & 304 indicators) are comprehensive, spanning four broad areas — human rights, labour, environment and anti-corruption.
• It replaces the Millennium Development Goals as the post-2015 development agenda.
• The Rio+20 summit (2012) in Rio de Janeiro produced the SDGs, which are non-binding documents.

Assessment of these Goals-

• Over the last nine years, nearly 15,000  companies worldwide have begun regularly reporting their progress toward the SDGs through participation in the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC), a network of 71 national secretariats and a central international directorate.
• In the recent study of SDG reporting practices among Swedish companies and small-medium enterprises (SMEs), it is found that SDGs on gender equality, responsible production and consumption, climate action and economic growth were regularly reported on.
• Organisations rarely report on goals that deal with hunger and poverty eradication as well as life below water.

Why do some SDGs attract substantially less attention and resources from companies?

• Reporting on a few SDGs is inconvenient or it may result in bad public relations.
• Reporting depends on how companies assess the relevance of an SDG for their business strategy or the SDG’s relevance in relation to its importance to their stakeholders.
• This shows how companies disclose comprehensive information about the impact of their work.
• The institutional priorities of the UN itself.
• The HeForShe campaign, the leading campaign for UN Women, was launched the same year as the SDGs- 2015.
• The HeForShe campaign material actively mentioned SDG 5 (gender equality).
• It’s easy to surmise that the UN’s focus on gender equity may have caused more organisations to pay attention to this particular SDG.
• Another reason is cultural priorities. Organisations align annual reports with state regulations, initiatives and cultural practices.
  • For example, the nation of Denmark, where extreme forms of poverty and hunger do not affect the population. So, one might expect fewer companies to report on these SDGs.
  • To combat this issue, Denmark launched a national project in 2020 to determine how the SDGs could be recalibrated to comprehensively fit a Danish context, with a report called ’Make Global Goals Our Goals’.
  • This report attempts to translate the 17 SDGs into 197 Danish indicators. As a result, SDG 1, which focuses on ending extreme poverty, has been translated into a series of indicators meant to target ending poverty to relative poverty and building systems for poverty prevention and resilience, so one can now expect to see more reporting on the subject in Denmark.

Ensuring more comprehensive reporting on SDGs–

• Reporting on the SDGs will continue to be uneven.
• The UNGC, governments and NGOs can ensure that these goals are more comprehensively reported on.
  • Companies should explain data collection, data sources and limitations of their research. They should explain who their core stakeholders are and how their priorities and needs were collected and interpreted.
• Organisations should be expected to report on every SDG.

If an SDG does not apply to that organisation, they should explain the reasons in their reports.